Random Accesses

I just saw a story about the NSA gearing up a datacenter to potentially hold a yottabyte of surveillance data. The whole surveillance angle itself is pretty interesting, but what caught my attention was the concept of the yottabyte. The yottabyte is 1024 bytes. That is three levels above the petabyte, which itself is a million gigabytes.

Lets first build up to the yottabyte in today’s standards. A one page Microsoft Word document is anywhere from 50 to 100 kilobytes (KB). A picture from your camera is typically anywhere from 0.5 to 3 megabytes (MB) and a song you might download from Itunes is usually about 3 or 4 megabytes (MB). Moving up the ladder, popular consumer devices such as iphones, ipods, and digital cameras hold anywhere from 1 to 100 gigabytes (GB) of storage capacity. The top of the line hard drives that you can buy at Best Buy are now 2 terabytes.

Assuming Google has 1 million servers each with 1 terabyte of storage (a size Google has already reached or likely will reach in the next year) we can estimate that Google has leap frogged the petabyte and now boasts a total worldwide storage capacity of roughly 1 exabyte. The storage capacity of the approximately 1 billion personal computers worldwide in 2009 with an average storage capacity of perhaps 250 gigabytes (GB) of storage each is not even half a zettabyte!

Source;http://singularityhub.com/2009/11/03/enter-the-yottabyte-one-billion-petabytes/